The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

When I was in high school, I desperately wanted to sign up for the Columbia House Record Club, but my mother wouldn’t let me.

“You don’t understand,” I pleaded. “If I sign up now, I can get the Greatest Hits of 1998 – including Celine Dion’s It’s All Coming Back to Me Now and Coolio’s Gangsta's Paradise – for just 1 cent!”

My mother looked at the mailer from the record club and pointed out to me that if I kept going, I would soon be ordering CDs for $9.99, money that would be coming out of her checkbook, not mine, because at that time I didn’t have any money.

“There’s the rub,” she said.

At the time, I wondered just exactly what a “rub” was, anyway. It turns out that the expression comes from Hamlet. “To sleep, perchance to dream… there's the rub.” It means an obstacle, or in Hamlet’s case, suicide.

All of this came to mind on a recent webinar we held with David Linthicum of GigaOm on the topic of “The Hidden Costs of the Cloud.” It turns out the cloud has a few potential rubs – the enterprise computing equivalent of the 1-cent record that leads to having to get bailed out by your mother.

Rich Morrow, founder of quiCloud, and Janakiram MSV, principal analyst at Janakiram & Associates, joined me on the webinar to discuss the full scope of pricing cloud applications and where to look for hidden costs that can derail a move to the cloud.

We kicked off the call asking the audience what they thought were the likely sources of hidden costs of moving to cloud in their respective enterprises. Fifty-six percent of the respondents said that a “lack of understanding of cloud operations costs” was going to drive hidden costs; 19 percent thought cloud subscription prices would be higher than expected; and 18 percent said that talent required would be more expensive than planned.

This answer makes sense. Enterprise IT professionals understand there are many hidden costs in cloud operations. This is particularly true with some of the prevalent “erector set” type cloud platforms requiring the IT manager to architect a solution on his or her own, with all kinds of add-on costs accruing unexpectedly.

Within that scenario, there is also the risk of making an expedient cloud architecture. In some cases, the team responsible for migrating to the cloud does what some of us call a “forklifting” of a legacy application to the cloud. Once it’s ported over, it gets left alone, no matter how inefficient the architecture might be. A fellow panelist described himself as a “DevOps Janitor,” mopping up the messes left by such projects.

The actual migration is generally the least of the costs. What’s much more significant in cost terms is a combination of operational details and people – an understanding that operational costs are rooted in the toolset. As an industry in general, we need to enable the customer better. People want the agility of the cloud – to do things better, faster and at scale. The cloud platforms need to handle that even when there’s a lot of complexity underneath.

Hidden costs are often in the fine print – the “rub,” as my mother might put it. For example, it takes a trained eye to spot the implications for moving data around in the cloud. Ingress of data might be free, but extracting it can be costly.

Where can cloud users save money? In our experience, the most savings come when users take advantage of the platform to optimize their workloads. Cloud environments are inherently elastic. You can turn them off and recreate them. It’s a different mindset from traditional on premise “stand up the infrastructure” approaches.

There’s no need to keep a cloud environment running when it’s not needed. In one developer environment we run, the virtual machines are spun down at night and weekends. This leads to a big reduction in server up hours and a lot of money saved.

Similarly, it’s good cloud economics to avoid either over- or under-specing the instance. By habit, a lot of us tend to build the biggest, most powerful server we can when we’re setting up a cloud environment. I call this the “Everything’s bigger in Texas” attitude. This approach makes sense when you’re ordering a server that will have to sit on a rack for four years, but it’s not smart business when you can add compute capacity on demand. Object retention policies can also eat up a lot of fees if not scoped correctly.

Cloud operations are different. They’re very scalable. They’re built to ensure that a traditional consumer/single instance can be used in a dynamic way. This includes monitoring tools.

We have to ask, “What can we do differently?” And, we have to ask, “What does the vendor already supply?” There’s a tendency to reinvent the wheel, especially in early stage ventures. We’ve all seen dev teams spend time creating a cloud storage solution that will never be as good as Amazon S3.

Cloud operations aren’t inherently costly or inexpensive. It takes people to make those right or wrong decisions. Knowledge levels and familiarity with new paradigms are critical to avoiding hidden costs of the cloud. Indeed, when we asked the webinar audience “How do you compare cloud providers in your enterprise,” 64 percent said they would compare on the basis both human and subscription costs.

Both matter.

The human cost differential comes from being able to think clearly about what’s needed and what’s not in the cloud. Skills preparation, readiness and training are all essential to keeping your people economical in the cloud. Operations and support people have to be taught to think in cloud terms. Due to a cloud ops talent gap, it may be cheaper to outsource to a managed service than keep cloud operations in-house in the beginning. It’s a different discipline from what they might currently know.

At the end of the presentation, we were asked what lessons we had learned from early cloud adopters in the enterprise. Here are some of our thoughts:

Splurge on early planning.

Plan on making some mistakes. There are a lot of holes to step in when you get into the Cloud. IOT’s okay. Just learn to fail fast, as we say. Get your apps up. You can always turn them off.

Really understand your total Cloud strategy.

Plan. Collaborate. Plan. Be holistic. Plan.

Understand your tool set.

Work on constant optimization. Stay aware of industry innovations, which are nonstop and which will give you newfound abilities to improve the economics of your Cloud.

Cut your teeth on easier workloads. Then, when you have a good migration practice, move more complex workloads.

Leverage the efficiency of experts. Cloud providers have thought about how to do this at scale. You don’t have to have the expertise in house at first.